Artists framing architecture(s).
A non-edited and not yet organized archive of artists' works, which include signature architectures.

Sunday, 20 January 2013

Kreider and O'Leary + Portman

LA Tapped
Performance, The Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, USA
April 2010
‘I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something
like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we
ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not
kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object
unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do
not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace,
as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in
that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism. The
newer architecture therefore ... stands as something like an imperative
to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new,
yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.’– Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1984)

LA Tapped is a spatial enactment of the Westin Bonaventure
Hotel in Los Angeles, CA, performing the building as per Frederic
Jameson’s reading of it; that is, as model of postmodern architecture
and allegory for the logic of late capital. The performance entailed
moving around the building and tap dancing a set sequence at various
locations throughout the Bonaventure including elevators, walkways,
hallways, shops, indoor track, outdoor pool and peripheral spaces.
The video work LA Tapped (or the story of a harmless
little girl, who had been carried by a cyclone many miles from home; and
she had never killed anything in all her life) documents this performance, while becoming a work in its own right. Coupling the footage of the performance LA Tapped at the Bonaventure with sound and image taken from John Pilger’s The War We Did Not See, the
work aims to expose an enmeshment of the topologies and representations
of our built environment not just with the logic of late capital, but
also with the systematic violence that this logic both upholds and
reinforces.
Stills from the video work were used in the book:Bonaventure : Hyperspace - Sensorium - Connectivity - War by Kreider + O’Leary (Unnameable Press, 2012).